I wouldn’t say I’m cynical, merely skeptical. Still, the webcomic Megacynics does capture how I look as a typical conversation I might have degenerates into nonsense. Click the drawing to see the whole strip!

I’d define a cynic as someone who tends to assume the worst of other people — who habitually leaps to the conclusion that other people are being either immoral or stupid. It’s far closer to “pessimist” than to “skeptic”. It’s pessimism applied to human nature. Skeptics have more of a grip on the fact that you don’t have to be stupid or bad in order to be wrong.

Many years ago, someone told me that a friend of hers had reported an experience of being abducted by aliens. I asked if she believed the alleged abduction had actually occurred, whereupon she became very defensive, insisting, “My friend would not lie”. I didn’t have a chance to point out that lying and being right are not the only possibilities.

The wild claims in the comic (pocket-dial your ex!) remind me of a really dumb chain e-mail I got last year claiming that July had 5 full weekends (Fri, Sat & Sun) only once every 753 years (or some such huge non-round number, rather than the actual average of 7). The ridiculousness was compounded by the addition of a claim that the Dao De Jing (from way back in 6th-Century BC China) had attributed some character to this occurrence (a consequence of the Gregorian calendar from 1582 Europe).

Oh dear. They made you repeat NASA’s PR Dept. math error. To wit, from “apogee distance is 14% larger than perigee distance” it does NOT follow that “perigee distance is 14% less than apogee distance”!